The Secrets of Solace

by Jaleigh Johnson

  That wasn’t why she was crying, why her shoulders were shaking and her face was scrunched up like a lump of wet clay. She cried because Ozben was there to share the moment of triumph with her. There was so much that she wanted to say to him. She wanted to tell him how grateful she was, how overwhelmed that he’d helped a person he barely knew and kept her secret the whole time. She wanted to tell him how much she had needed a friend like him.

  But the words and feelings got tangled up in her throat, and in the end, all she could say was “We did it!” She let out a whoop and threw her arms around Ozben as a laugh of pure joy welled up inside her.

  Then Ozben was hugging her back and laughing with her, and when they’d calmed down enough that they were no longer screaming, Aethon ventured out from under the worktable and streaked across the chamber to climb in and out of their laps. Lina scooped him up and let his warmth wash over her like a tiny sun.

  When her head finally stopped spinning, Lina got to her feet and half walked, half hobbled over to the ship to stand beneath the door. She started to reach her arms up to grasp the edge of the gangplank.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” Ozben got up and scurried over to her. “We need to clean those cuts.”

  Lina gaped at him in disbelief. “And stop now?” she said, barely able to contain her excitement. “We need to open it.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’ll still be here in ten minutes,” Ozben pointed out. He raised his arms expansively to encompass the ship’s bulk. “It’s a little too big to run away, don’t you think?”

  Lina looked at the ship and then at her hands. She stifled a groan, but she knew Ozben was right. She’d waited this long, so she could probably stand the suspense for a few minutes more. Besides, her hands and knees were killing her, and she imagined Ozben’s blisters hurt bad too.

  “Let’s go to the underground stream,” she suggested. “It’s back in the northwest corner of the chamber.” She nodded at a darkened corner where the stalactites dipped low. “Grab one of the lanterns.”

  Ozben retrieved a lantern from the worktable, and Lina whispered to the lumatites for some additional light as they made their way across the cavern. Aethon decided to stay by the ship, either to stand guard or to give himself an impromptu bath. Lina couldn’t help looking back three or four times to make sure that the ship was indeed staying right where they left it.

  “The chamber goes back pretty far,” Ozben said as they walked, their voices echoing in the cavern. Distantly, Lina heard the sound of flowing water from the underground stream.

  “I don’t come back here very much,” she admitted. “The chamber gets smaller, and there’s nothing to see besides the water.”

  “It’s not so narrow,” Ozben observed, holding the light above his head. “The Merlin could still get through here on its landing wheels.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lina asked, confused.

  “It’s just…” Ozben hesitated, and was lost in thought for a moment. When he spoke again, he seemed to be choosing his words carefully. “I’ve been exploring the cavern a bit the past few days, that’s all.”

  “You have?” Lina was surprised to hear that. She hadn’t noticed Ozben wandering off to explore, but the airship tended to absorb all her attention when she was in her workshop.

  “I kept wondering what the people were thinking who brought the ship here,” Ozben said. “You told me they rebuilt it in this chamber, but why would they do that unless they had a way to get it outside somehow so they could fly it? I mean, surely they intended to try to get the ship to fly, didn’t they?”

  Lina shrugged. “I guess so,” she said. “Maybe they made a door, and it got buried by the same cave-in that buried the ship.”

  “That’s what I thought too at first,” Ozben said, “but then I started looking closer at the back walls—and I found something.”

  Holding up the lantern, he led her to a far corner of the cavern where a thick nest of stalagmites were arranged in front of the wall like a row of soldiers standing at attention. Shining the light beyond them, Ozben pointed with his other hand at the wall. “See that lump jutting out? It looks like stone, but it’s not. It’s metal.”

  Skeptical, Lina peered into the shadowy corner at the spot. It took her eyes a moment to separate the object from the surrounding rock, but when she did, she let out a sharp gasp, her breath fogging in the cold air.

  Ozben was right. The lump jutting from the wall was made entirely of metal. In fact, it looked to be some kind of mechanism with a myriad of gears, cranks, and chains, but it had rusted so much, it was barely distinguishable from the rest of the cavern wall. And it had been hidden behind the row of stalagmites for who knew how many years.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said, her voice hushed. “I never knew this was here.”

  “Like you said, you don’t come back here much, and you’d never see this unless you were really looking for it,” Ozben pointed out. He shone the light along the cavern wall. “I think the mechanism might have been used to open a door right around here. See how the stone is smooth, not rough and pitted like the rest of the wall? I think that part is man-made. And there are marks all along the floor that look like they were made from stone sliding across stone.”

  He was right again. Deep grooves in the stone floor ran in a straight line from one end of the chamber to the edge of their circle of light. Lina couldn’t believe she’d never thought to look for anything like this before. “When did you find this?” she pressed him, excited by the discovery but confused—and just a little bit hurt—that Ozben hadn’t told her about it immediately. It meant they’d found another piece of the puzzle that was the Merlin.

  “Yesterday,” Ozben said. He seemed to sense she was unhappy and added quickly, “But so much has happened in the past few days—the assassin, the flaming cat, us going into hiding—I didn’t want to overwhelm you. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you right away.”

  “I understand,” Lina said, her hurt fading in the face of his concern. She knew Ozben had been worried about her, and she had been overwhelmed by the events of the past few days, but she was ready to turn all her attention to the Merlin now. “The mechanism looks broken,” she said, glancing at the rusted contraption. “Or maybe just neglected. Either way, it’ll need some work before we try to activate it.”

  “I could take a closer look at it later, see what it might take to fix it,” Ozben offered.

  For just a second, Lina thought she detected an odd note in Ozben’s voice. She didn’t know how to describe it, though, and so she thought she must be imagining things. She considered his idea but then shook her head. They were getting ahead of themselves. “First things first,” she said. “Once we’re inside the ship, we’ll know soon enough if she’ll ever fly again. Then maybe we can start thinking about fixing the door.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Ozben said. He looked as if he wanted to say something else, but he fell quiet. Lina wondered whether he was feeling all right. Then she remembered the blisters on his hands. If they were hurting as much as the injuries on her hands were, the pain was probably distracting him. That must be it.

  They left the mechanism and made their way back to the stream. Together they sat down at the edge. The stream was little more than a dark ribbon of water flowing through the back of the chamber, but it was clean and fresh, and when Lina dipped her hands in, she hissed at the numbing cold. It helped to put out the fire in her hands, though, and when she’d washed her wounds, she let Ozben apply medicine and bandage them as they sat beside the stream. Afterward, Lina treated the blisters on his hands.

  “There,” she said when she’d finished. “Hopefully we won’t have to move any more boulders for a while.” She picked up her leather wristband where the lumatites rested.

  “Agreed. You know, you never told me about that project with the fireflies,” Ozben said, studying the leather band. “You said your parents worked on it?”

  Lina nodded. “My mom
and dad were the ones who first discovered the lumatites,” she said. “It’s actually a funny story. A dozen of them had infested this scarlet fabric that a scrapper had scavenged from the meteor fields.” She smiled at the memory. “Mom and Dad loved studying rare fabrics and tapestries. Stories told in cloth—that’s what they liked to call them. When my mom saw the lumatites, she thought at first they were one of our native species, eating away at the cloth. Oh, she was furious.” Lina giggled. “She told me how she had this big wooden ruler and she was dancing around with it, yelling. She couldn’t decide whether she should swat the bugs, and risk smashing them all over the rare fabric, or let them keep eating it.”

  Ozben echoed her laugh. “She didn’t squash them, though, right?”

  “Oh no,” Lina said. “When she looked closer, she realized that they weren’t normal bugs and they weren’t eating the fabric after all. That’s when she knew she had something special, insects she’d never seen before, so then she really starts yelling, hollering for my dad and waving that ruler at him to help her get the bugs off the fabric.”

  “But you communicate with them, right?” Ozben said curiously. “I’ve seen you talking to them, and they listen to you. I’ve never heard of anyone communicating with bugs before.”

  “Mom and Dad used to say that it was more about recognizing what the species needed and developing a cooperative relationship,” Lina said. “That’s where they got the idea for the name of the bugs too. ‘Lumatites’ means ‘illumination,’ but it also encompasses the sarnun concept of lumatia—the connection with another.”

  Ozben snapped his fingers. “You’re right—I know that word,” he said. “I thought it was the sarnun word for ‘love.’ But it’s not just that, is it—it means a…bond, doesn’t it?”

  “The recognition of a person who completes another’s needs,” Lina confirmed. She held up the leather band so Ozben could see the halpern stalks she’d woven into the leather for them to eat. “By studying the insects, Mom and Dad discovered that the lumatites needed the nutrients from these stalks to survive. But what they didn’t know was that the lumatites were also studying Mom and Dad at the same time.”

  “Studying them?” Ozben echoed as he watched the lumatites. “What were they looking for?”

  “Something that they could provide us in exchange for the halpern stalks,” Lina said. “Somehow, they discovered we needed light. Probably by observing Mom and Dad stumbling around in the dark whenever their lanterns burned out.”

  “You’re saying they spontaneously developed the ability to produce light from their butts just so they could help you see in the dark?” Ozben said, snorting. “You’re serious?”

  Lina scowled at him. “I think it’s fascinating. Like you said, we’ve never observed an insect behaving in this way before or being able to evolve so quickly. The fact that they were reaching out to us, trying to communicate—it’s like bridging a little of the gap between worlds. Mom and Dad were thrilled every day they worked on the project.” Sadness rushed in on Lina unexpectedly, and her irritation spiked. Why had Ozben asked her about this in the first place if he was just going to make fun of her?

  “I’m going back to the ship,” she said. She stood up and moved off across the cavern. “We’ve wasted enough time here.”

  “Lina, wait.” Ozben stepped in front of her, forcing her to stop. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have joked about it.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Lina said, trying to go around him, but he reached out and touched her shoulder.

  “It does matter,” Ozben insisted. “I didn’t mean to insult your parents’ work.” He ducked his head, and he really did appear contrite. Then he looked up and met her eyes. “How did they die?” he asked.

  The question shouldn’t have caught her off guard the way it did, but Lina couldn’t help the painful tightening in her chest, or the way Ozben’s words brought the memory crashing down on her.

  “They died of the crestara fever,” Lina said quietly. “There was an outbreak here when I was nine. I got it too, but for some reason, I didn’t have it as bad.”

  Sorrow creased Ozben’s face. “I’m sorry. I remember the fever a little. It hit Ardra, but my parents said the outbreaks were worse farther south, especially in the archivists’ strongholds.”

  “Because there were so many people in a confined space,” Lina said, her thoughts far away as she remembered how Zara had explained it to her.

  Zara.

  Her teacher’s name conjured a different memory, one she’d forgotten for a long time.

  Until she discovered the memory jar.

  —

  “It has to be you, Zara.” Her father was the one speaking, his voice muffled by weakness and the heavy oak door that separated nine-year-old Lina from her parents’ sickroom.

  Lina knew that if anyone passed by in the hall, they would make her go back to her bed. She scrunched herself into a tight ball against the door, her nightgown tucked around her legs, determined not to let anyone budge her. The door was locked, which Lina hated, but she knew it was to protect her from being exposed to the fever in the sickroom, even though she’d already had it and recovered. The archivists weren’t taking any chances with the children.

  But Lina had to hear her father’s voice, to drink it in. Her mother had already slipped into a sleep from which no one would be able to wake her.

  “You’re the only one who can understand her,” her father said, and Lina’s tears made dark streaks down the wooden door. “She’s going to need that understanding in order to thrive.”

  Lina was surprised to hear her father say that. She knew Zara as well as she knew most of the archivists who worked in her parents’ department, but she’d never thought the older woman was anything like her.

  “Ethan, you know that I would do anything for you and Rachella,” Zara replied. Lina recalled, with the crystal clarity of the memory jar, the way Zara’s voice had trembled on her mother’s name. They had been such close friends. “But are you sure this is what you want? I’m no good at this—being a mother…” Her voice trailed off, and for a long moment, there was only silence and the sound of Lina’s breathing as she pressed her ear to the cold door as hard as she could to hear what was said next.

  “I wouldn’t trust anyone else,” her father said, and Lina could imagine his eyes softening as he smiled at Zara. He used to do the same thing with her. Whenever Lina doubted herself, like the day he’d begun teaching her the alphabet and all the letters ran together in crazy loops and swirls in her mind. Or the day he’d taken her on her first trip to the library and told her that soon she’d be able to read every book on the shelves if she wanted to. All he’d had to do to get her over her fear was to pull out that smile of his. She was powerless against it.

  As it turned out, Zara was too. Lina’s parents died the next day, within hours of each other, and Zara agreed to become Lina’s teacher and guardian.

  But whereas Lina remembered every detail of that night, from the roughness of the wooden door against her cheek to the cold seeping through her nightgown, at some point over the years, Zara had forgotten what her father had said and the importance of the promise she’d made.

  Lina sighed and forced herself back to the present. Ozben was looking at her, concern etched in the crinkles of his forehead. “You looked like you were a million miles away,” he said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought up bad memories.”

  “I’m all right,” Lina said, but she didn’t try to smile. It was still too close, the memory of sitting in front of that door. “It’s just, Zara was supposed to be the one to take care of me because my mom and dad thought she understood me. I don’t think that’s true. I mean, at first, we got along great. She became my teacher, and she helped me, after they died.”

  The first few months had been the worst, but Zara was there for her through the nightmares and the lonely nights when she’d woken crying, curled up in misery on the bed. Back then, Zara had been more like a mot
her, gathering her up and rocking her back to sleep. They’d grown close, so when Zara began her studies, Lina had been excited to have her as a teacher as well. For the next two years, they worked side by side, and Lina gradually let go of the darkness of the past.

  “What happened?” Ozben asked, drawing her from her thoughts. “What changed?”

  “I don’t know,” Lina said. She looked around the cold, quiet cavern, listening to the drip of water. “One minute, we were best friends, and the next—it’s as if she became a different person.” Distant, distracted. “We had fewer and fewer lessons. She gave me work to do on my own. Whole days would go by, and I wouldn’t see her. She’d just leave written instructions for what she wanted me to do. Eventually, she said her work on the council made her too busy to teach me, and she tried to assign me to another archivist.” A rueful smile curved her lips. “It didn’t go well. I started spending more time exploring and mapping the stronghold, searching for secret tunnels. And eavesdropping,” she added, which made Ozben smile. She shrugged, wishing there were some kind of artifact that would allow her to bury the regrets of the past deep inside her, where they could never hurt again. “That brings us to where we are now.”

  They resumed walking, and soon the candles and lanterns illuminated the Merlin casting its shadow across the chamber before them. Aethon had fallen asleep under the ship’s wing. Ozben was quiet, and Lina thought that meant they’d finished talking about Zara, so she was surprised when he spoke up again. “But Zara lets you explore Ortana as much as you want,” he said. “And she let you hide me down here in your workshop. I mean, she must trust you, even if she doesn’t always understand you, right?”

  Lina considered his words. It was true she’d been more amazed than anyone that Zara had let her carry out her plan for hiding Ozben. And Zara had been more lenient than any of the archivists about her explorations and eavesdropping. In fact, it was often those times when Lina thought her teacher was going to be most inflexible that she ended up surprising Lina.